Timeshift - Anyone Know What it is??

zxcvbnm

So, the good news about streaming from home wi-fi to a smart tv is no DVR or wires to clutter up the entertainment center. Now the bad news, as I see it - you can't pause a show - whether a movie or live TV. What am I missing here? With apps like Prime, Netflix, etc. when you need to get up and leave the room you hit "pause" on the remote (>=). Come back hit it again and resume where you left off. Additionally, you can rewind and fast forward. However, with the Spectrum app, when you hit pause, nothing happens, and the show keeps going. I did some research on something called Timeshift where basically you insert a USB drive into a port on the TV (Samsung my case) then hit 123 or Play on remote and the TV is supposed to pause until you get back and hit it again. This does not work with Spectrum app.

So how do you guys get around pausing a show from Spectrum app until you return back to the room. (Again, I'm referring to a wi-fi connection to TV, not the dvr)

William_M

Hi @zxcvbnm, welcome to our community!

I'm unfamiliar with timeshift, but @HT_Greenfield has the right idea about pausing. On demand content through the Spectrum TV app and streaming sites like Netflix have the video file loaded to a server in advance of you watching it, so pausing and resuming is easy. Live TV can't be loaded in advance so there needs to be something recording what was playing while you were away. Even regular cable receivers cannot pause Live TV, you would need DVR service to have that capability.

We do offer Cloud DVR, it cannot pause live TV but it can save Live TV to a remote server which can then be played back through our app with pause/rewind capabilities. Most new shows are available On Demand and/or available through the TV networks own app which we provided access to with your Spectrum username and password, I primarily only watch shows On Demand and is what I would recommend with your setup.

HT_Greenfield

I’m pretty sure that whatever you can do with Prime Video and Netflix on-demand playback, you can also do with Spectrum TV on-demand. Watching “live” TV in real time is another ball-game. I’m not sure that the stated time-shifting technique with a flash storage device would work for anything but what the TV itself would be tuning and decoding from its antenna input but the only way to do it with “live” Spectrum TV in real time is with a DVR-equipped set-top cable TV receiver.

zxcvbnm

Seems like you are correct. So much for the benefit if streaming over wi-fi. 😡

zxcvbnm

Agreed. The whole thing came about because I wanted to get rid of the DVR/wires. Afterall the trend is to replace hardware with wi-fi. If you're going to use Spectrum cloud to record, why have a DVR? Smart TV's are touted to receive straight from the internet through your wi-fi. What they don't tell you is you can't pause live TV with wi-fi unless you use Timeshift with a USB plugged into the TV to buffer while the pause is enabled; basically, replacing the DVR. What I've learned after reading the fine print is it only works with an antenna as the input source (which I'm not going to install).

So. its back to the old DVR technology with messy cables. (And an extra charge per month for that DVR; which is probably the real reason why you can't pause live TV over wi-fi when you think about it 😉)